Poverty and access to welfare benefits

Abstract

Most welfare states attempt to alleviate poverty, though some more successfully than others. This chapter discusses why some welfare states invest more in social policies that reduce the level of poverty. It explains how welfare states crystallized out of historical power struggles between organized interests, and how the resulting institutions of social and economic regulation continue to determine how present-day trade-offs regarding social policy reform are resolved. Welfare state types are associated with variegated policy trajectories and outcomes regarding the access to and uptake of different types of welfare benefits and the level of poverty. The chapter concludes by discussing some trends that cut across welfare state types, and that are associated with declined access to welfare benefits and increased poverty rates for, in particular, the non-elderly population: (1) ‘dualization drift’; (2) increased selectivity and its potential impacts on stigmatization, deservingness, and non-take-up; and (3) the rise of ‘anti-poverty policies’ as a response to welfare gaps resulting from the declined ‘comprehensiveness’ of social protection.